A Study On The Relationship Between Cultural Translation And Cultural Identity In Diaspora Chinese American Literature History From The Postcolonial Perspective

As the course of translation studies carries on,scholars have casted their eyes upon a rather new field,proceeding their effort from the postcolonial perspective.Meanwhile the definition of translation has been constantly refreshed,enriched and gone beyond its traditional sense as linguistic and semantic transference between languages since the “cultural turn”,resulting in the fuzziness between translation and writing.Homi Bhabha refreshed it by insisting that the state of being transferred from a country(thus a culture)to another should be interpreted as “translational phenomenon” in his masterpiece,The Location of Culture.Therefore,the “cultural translation” phenomenon referred in this thesis should by no means be interpreted as the pure linguistic and sematic transposition.Rather,it involves cultural différance——the spatial,geographical and temporal displacement of culture,and pays more attention to the functionality of translation as a carrier for cultural transmission.The very purpose of this thesis is to view and study translation phenomenon from the perspective of its cultural function concerning shaping cultural image and identity in specific historical contexts.In today's globalization context frequented by increasingly intense immigration,it is common that diapora writers pen their works with “double identities”.So their diaspora experiences as well as their works dedicating to the description of root country are the best demonstration of the interaction between “cultural translation”and cultural identity.To describe this kind of relationship,the thesis employs the fundamentals of Homi Bhabha's cultural translation theory and Orientalism.It firstly takes on the macro perspective of cultural translation,resorting to the diaspora Chinese American history and the binary interaction between root culture and other culture,between Self and Other,and between the Center and the Periphery revealed in this regard.And then from the micro perspective,by taking the binary interaction into the investigation of the relationship between cultural translation and cultural identity,it cites detailed texts of writers in different historical contexts and answers how cultural translation shapes cultural identity,and vice versa.And hopefully thisdiachronic investigation which shows the interaction between the two can bring newness into the going global program of Chinese culture.